°Sitrep

March 22, 2009

Filed under: Screen + Galactica + theologico-politico
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15 Comments »

  1. God is communist! Battlestar said so! Also, Kierkegaard trumps Nietzsche. Sorry, but I couldn’t contain myself. Notice I’m carefully avoiding saying anything substantive. Has it already been shown over there or what?

    Sarapen [March 22, 2009 @ 12:25 pm]

  2. It has, watched it last night! I should say that I was disappointed with the last third. I was going to ask someone if they’d give me a more interesting way to read it than I was doing. But I’ll have to be persuaded.

    The best I could come up with last night was that it was so idyllic as to be a reference/akin to the final sequence of Bladerunner - as in: a fantasy.

    s0metim3s [March 22, 2009 @ 12:26 pm]

  3. Anti-climatic and disappointing.

    Craig [March 22, 2009 @ 12:30 pm]

  4. I found it disappointing too, that last third. The cynical part of me wonders if America/the West has any other way of envisaging a future…? Excuses for colonialism (isn’t ‘the best’ what every colonial nation imagines itself as offering?), a ‘pioneering spirit’ and a spiritual mandate? Meh! Oh, and let’s not forget the romanticism of giving up tech because *it* is the source of the bad (but a bad that is apparently an essential part of human/cylon nature, since it’s a transhistorical phenomenon, a grand narrative resituated in a complex system repetition in which We Are The Chosen Ones?). I don’t know. Apparently I feel pretty grumpy about it, which is probably because I want a more interesting reading too. I guess part of it is me still dreaming of Nietzschean anti-Platonism (rather than just Nietzschean anti-moralism), which I know is vaguely ridiculous in the context of this whole story.

    All of that said, I was moved, over and again, throughout. Mostly because I’m pretty attached to the characters, I guess…

    But I did have one question: did most of the new settlers head for Greece (with all the gods’ names on their tongues?)

    WildlyParenthetical [March 22, 2009 @ 2:16 pm]

  5. The explanation for everything was essentially “a wizard did it”, which is in no way satisfying, so that was definitely disappointing. And yes, happily ever after (through colonialism, no less) doesn’t seem to really click thematically with all the other things the show did. Still, that crack at the end about God hating decadent commercialism stood out for me. Humanity is always destined for capitalism? Socialists hate robots? Your ipod will eventually kill you? So many things implied by just that one statement. I’m almost certainly reading too much into it.

    Still, it apparently could have been worse. I’ve been reading about Galactica stuff in the lead-up to the end, and I just found out that Ron Moore originally wanted to end the first season with Starbuck meeting God in the form of a cigar-smoking Dirk Benedict (the Boomer from the 70s). This idea was nixed by the rest of the writing staff on the grounds of being idiotic. So, bullet dodged, then.

    Sarapen [March 23, 2009 @ 11:28 am]

  6. I kept assuming/wanting the ‘wizard’ to be Daniel - this would have made more sense than dropping the Daniel thread entirely …

    And the tech thing - agreed. Likewise the benevolent colonialism - at this point I polled the room, and most agreed that we would have rather enjoyed it more had they been savaged by a lion or clubbed to death while peering through their binoculars (much as we’re attached to the characters).

    WP, I don’t for a moment doubt that Greece was the destination (tho I missed the detail in the script if there was one). And isn’t it dull when destiny comes into play? That said, I circumvented my distaste for the transhistoricism by noting that the “This has all happened before … ” line was riffing off Kosh (a character from Babylon 5 ), where the implication is less transhistoricist than the effect of time travel.

    s0metim3s [March 23, 2009 @ 12:02 pm]

  7. Ron Moore said somewhere that he really wanted the mysticism not to be technologically or scientifically explicable, and that “mysticism has been in the show from the beginning.” (Sorry, can’t find the link.) I feel like that’s a total cop-out: in fact, the “All this has happened before” line was explained as a result of the Fives’ time travel and lost memories. I’m fine with the wizard doing it, but at least they could be consistent with attribution.

    And wow, if only that line of binocular-wielding men in fatigues had been clubbed to death by the “natives”. Or if one had jumped Lee in the middle of that god-awful speech about giving up technology, starting anew (and giving the natives language.)

    I am also a little disappointed that the only characters who died were already marked for it. Anya’s death in the Buffy finale felt totally gratuitous, and yet it made the final battle believable. Real tears, you know? Whereas here, Tory and Boomer were already lost and Roslin has been dying for years.

    However, Romo Lampkin as President: hell yeah.

    az [March 23, 2009 @ 3:44 pm]

  8. Helo almost died and the best character since season two also died. It would seem the “savages attack!” or “and Hera is eaten by a lion” reaction to the discovery of Earth is pretty common. Too bad they didn’t include it in the show.

    Craig [March 24, 2009 @ 2:29 am]

  9. Helo totally should have died: I teared up when I thought he had, but then the carefully-preserved nuclear family playing in the grass made me want to puke.

    But with you all the way on the Lampkin for Prez front.

    I think part of why I’m so grumpy about the colonialism thing is that it felt like the entire series, really, was meant to be about negotiating with and deconstructing ideas of humanness and difference. And then finally we reach our ‘end’, and that end is to give up the existing difference-generating force (tech) so that we only give the ‘good stuff,’ carefully human and supposedly ‘non-tech’ language, to the ‘natives’? Wow. Way to undo so much of the work that had been done. I get that part of that was designed to give responsibility for contemporary reiterations of the obsession with tech to the viewer, but it felt like it fell back into being a warning against tech itself, rather than a warning against singular notions of what it means to be human.

    WildlyParenthetical [March 24, 2009 @ 5:32 pm]

  10. The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to think it’s a confusion wrought (on some) by the election of Obama. Those brightly-lit, verdant grasslands (a bit like the pretty parts of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth), the recourse to technology as problem/solution, etc … But, really, the clincher is the narrative dominance of the het couplings - though what to make of that other ‘coupling’, albeit apparently asexual but, still, the new military-political one: Hoshi, who we already know is gay, and Lampkin, who has a thing for animals.

    s0metim3s [March 24, 2009 @ 6:31 pm]

  11. Yes about Lampkin, but the dog is nowhere to be seen on Earth. You’d think the dog would want to run around and, appearing to be at least part border collie, herd the antelopes. A dog like that would be invaluable for animal domestication.

    What were those pills Adama was taking through the final season?

    Craig [March 24, 2009 @ 10:14 pm]

  12. Loved the idea of a Lampkin Prez, with his antelope munching mutt. But I agree the last half hour was awful. Yes, as expected they land on real earth …. gnnng… So, hunter gatherers who do not have language is anthropologically absurd. But hooray, the fleet will offer them language and sex - like some sort of twisted overseas aid program. Many set out to build bourgeois homes - Helo and Athena start an Ikea store. Anders for no reason destroys all the floating mecano set - despite the Lego TM functioning FDL drives. Starbuck disappears right out of the film - does she join Bilbo Baggins and the Elves after leaving middle earth? Gaius becomes a film producer on sunset strip, not and angel, and though he hangs around till the 20th century, he has a job as an ad exec for Sony and is killed by double agents pretending to be anarchists protesting the G20 summit. Tyrel is just forgiven for killing his ex - and lives alone forever rewriting the chord progressions for cover songs by Nick Cave, building another invisible viper and eventually becoming head of Exxon. Tigh and Ellen are what - going to live together on earth forever, making kentucky burboun or something? Adama is going to become Jim Boon, selling stims to tourists outside Frontiersland in Florida. After all that death, what a surprise.

    Up till that two-thirds point I thought the last episode was superb. But then they end up in, I dunno, Cornwall or something!

    john [March 27, 2009 @ 11:48 pm]

  13. “…Much more palatable are those Utopias, from William Morris to Phil Dick, which are conceived in terms of handicraft and manual labor, the return to the rudiments of village production as a kind of implied rebuke to the passive consumption encouraged by commodity capitalism (elements also present in rudimentary form, as we have seen in ZARDOZ). Even though such visions are themselves anachronistic, insofar as they are ultimately inspired by an older archaic stage in the development of the economic system to which we can scarcely hope to return, their very ideologies redolent of the handicraft radicalism of tinkers and village shoemakers, the politics of Bunyan and Blake, let alone of the twenty-first or -second century. Yet the emphasis on labor rather than on knowledge amounts to a glorification of the Slave rather than the Master, of village industry rather than of that priestly caste whose monopoly on writing and books, as Lévi-Strauss suggests, was at the very origins of class society and of political domination.” (link )

    Z [March 28, 2009 @ 1:29 am]

  14. This is one of those moments where Jameson was very, very wrong. And why I would figure BSG’s turn from post-apocalyptic to utopian is tied up with the election of Obama (note) - these remonstrances against “passive consumption” and demands for a more authentic labour/productivity are the worst critique of capitalism possible.

    s0metim3s [March 28, 2009 @ 10:24 am]

  15. The funniest thing is the implied genocide of all the original humans of fake Earth…

    Badaboom-badabing!

    TCO [April 5, 2009 @ 10:37 pm]

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